Bachelorettes and bridal showers are women’s pre-wedding celebratory spaces which perform at either end of a moral binary. A woman has a ‘choice’; to follow either a puritanical, or a debaucherous performances of sexuality.

Commonly relegated to the realms of novelty or the mundane, in Phallus-ies these events are seen as spaces where women congregate and celebrate, and as the sites of social and cultural rituals which reinforce dominant patriarchal sexual scripts.

Once these stages are set, women default to modes of expression which they often do not seem comfortable with. The ceremonious props which surround them speak more of a masculine power fantasy and the presumed submissive female, rather than to more self-prescribed desires.

What messages are being sent or enforced here? Do women truly have permission to express sexual agency, or are we still encumbered by the oppositional restraints of the whore and virgin?